December 31, 2009

Summary for 2009, Plans for 2010

2009 was a bit silent year for me I did not find interesting topics to write, but I read too many interesting and new topics as you follow from blogroll report posts and book reviews. I think I did a good job with blogroll reports by them. I now have a very nice indexed Oracle Blogosphere for half of 2009. Blog reached over quarter million hits (when I say 250 000 it is not looking that big🙂 ) with average 400 visits a day. By your support, blog provided over 2500 gallons of clear water for people around the world, I want to thank you all who visited and supported the social vibe link at the bottom of the page.

From career perspective, In 2009 I mostly focused on performance tuning and backup recovery. I fully understood how Oracle Engine works in terms of performance management. I quit using TOAD and started to use sqlplus for %90 of my daily routine. I love Toad but i can’t stand slowness of it and after Tanel Poders script library plus my own scripts I find it far more easy to use sqlplus.

Because of dealing with performance, I started to be more obsessive about anything running slow and this obsessiveness made me quit Windows OS start using Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala as desktop. After 3 months of usage, I am quite happy about my decision. By Running Ubuntu on my new Quad Code CPU and 8GB ram desktop I can say that I now have my dream speed and lab. Migration was not painful as much as I expected I can do 95% + more of the things I was able to do on windows, I wish I have the same option with the laptop I am using for job but no chance.

I also quit firefox and sage rss reader and start using chrome as browser and google reader as reader with igoogle I highly recommend this combo to all of you.

For networking , I am still a bit shy when it comes to socializing at user group events. Normally I am a very social bloke, but I have a problem of introducing myself at meetings😦 it is something i need to work on harder.

I always had a fear of giving presentation even in Turkish and to sort this problem, I got a course for presentation skills in 2009 and I learned all the tricks of a good presentation. I also did a presentation at the course and I proved to myself that I am able to do presentation in English. Now I need a good topic to prepare a presentation to test my new skills.

I think thats about it for 2009 summary, and now it is time to talk about 2010 plans.

For the blog, I am planning to share more information in this blog from the sources I follow and read and from my own researches on top of them. I want to write a tool maybe a plugin for swingbench to generate common performance problems for new DBAs to test their troubleshooting skills. I also want to write possible crash recovery scenarios series.

For Oracle knowledge, I plan to learn Streams and Analytic functions. It is a shame for me that I never really cared much about these two.

For the books, I plan to read the ones below and I hope upcoming Apple Tablet will be affordable price to be my ebook reader. I wish I will finish at least half of them.

Practical Oracle 8i from Jonathan Lewis– I am in the middle of this book and what I discovered so far is that most of the information Jonathan shares from his blog is based on this book. I can say it is a must.

Expert Oracle Practices Oracle Database Administration from the Oak_Table– I read two chapters so far and to be honest it is not as good as I expected but book is in alpha stage so my thoughts can still change.

Scaling Oracle 8i by James Morle

SQL Tuning by Dan Tow

Relational Database Index Design and the Optimizers by Tapio Lahdenmaki and Michael Lech

Happ news year too Coşkan.
I’m surprised about How do you find time to do all this work.I’m sure that time management is very important for you and you have some methods To use time efficiently. Maybe you should write an article that mentioned it.
See you Take care

Thanks Umit. I can find time because I can do parallel processing and also by using right and lightweigt tools for daily operations and keyboard shortcuts I probably save at least one two weeks total of time in a year. sometimes sums of seconds can add huge amount of times in a year time.

I also continue work at home as well. You need to sacrifice from your private life for being good enough

Thanks for stopping by Hemant. I use Toad only when Toad fans are around at job and sometimes I really find it very handy to get the ddls but I think I am getting used to sqlplus maybe next year it will be %100.

Happy new year Coskan.
The blogroll reports are great – thanks.
We share a few goals for the coming year – presenting to co-workers being one of them (English being my only option ). Perhaps if we both manage that one for 2010 we may catch each other “up front” at a UKOUG SIG in 2011🙂
Jonathan Lewis’ Practical Oracle 8i is a great book and was a watershed moment for me.
Good luck with the resolutions for the coming year.
Neil

I personally use nearly all of the Tanel Poder Scripts they are really time saver and I heard that he is working on mother of all tuning scripts script.

I use OEM for tuning if I have license for tuning pack

I also use scripts from certain guys like Riyaj Shamsudeen and Kerry Osborne.

Charles Hooper shares very nice tools running with vbs.
I was using Quest Performance Analyzer but I really feel more faster and powerfull when I am on command line and sqlplus. I think Embercado technologies produce decent performance tools as well

For statspack I use Tanels Perfstat Sheet
and Tim Gormans scripts for statspack analyzing

Thats all I can say

Search for the names I mentioned and chek their own websites for the scripts / tools

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